Graphics processing typically involves coordination of two processors, a central processing unit (CPU) and a graphics processing unit (GPU). The GPU is a specialized electronic circuit designed to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobile phones, personal computers, tablet computers, portable game devices, workstations, and game consoles. A GPU is typically designed to be efficient at manipulating computer graphics. GPU's often have a highly parallel processing architecture that makes the GPU more effective than a general-purpose CPU for algorithms where processing of large blocks of data is done in parallel.
The CPU may send commands to the GPU to implement a particular graphics processing task, e.g. render a particular texture that has changed with respect to a previous frame in an image. These draw commands may be coordinated by the CPU with a graphics application interface (API) in order to issue graphics rendering commands that correspond to the state of the particular application's virtual environment.
In order to render textures for a particular program, a GPU may perform a series of processing tasks in a “graphics pipeline” to translate the visuals in the virtual environment into images that can be rendered onto a display. A typical graphics pipeline may include performing certain rendering or shading operations on virtual objects in the virtual space, transformation and rasterization of the virtual objects in the scene to produce pixel data suitable for output display, and additional rendering tasks on the pixels (or fragments) before outputting the rendered image on a display.
Virtual objects of an image are often described in virtual space in terms of shapes known primitives, which together make the shapes of the objects in the virtual scene. For example, objects in a three-dimensional virtual world to be rendered may be reduced to a series of distinct triangle primitives having vertices defined in terms of their coordinates in three-dimensional space, whereby these polygons make up the surfaces of the objects. Each polygon may have an associated index that can be used by the graphics processing system to distinguish a given polygon from other polygons. Likewise, each vertex may have an associated index that can be used to distinguish a given vertex from other vertices. A graphics pipeline may perform certain operations on these primitives to produce visuals for the virtual scene and transform this data into a two-dimensional format suitable for reproduction by the pixels of the display. The term graphics primitive information (or simply “primitive information”), as used herein, is used to refer to data representative of a graphics primitive. Such data includes, but is not limited to, vertex information (e.g., data representing vertex positions or vertex indices) and polygon information, e.g., polygon indices and information that associates particular vertices with particular polygons.
A GPU may perform these rendering tasks of the graphics pipeline by implementing programs commonly known as shaders. A typical graphics pipeline may include vertex shaders, which may manipulate certain properties of the primitives on a per-vertex basis, as well as pixel shaders (also known as “fragment shaders”), which operate downstream from the vertex shaders in the graphics pipeline and may manipulate certain values on a per-pixel basis before transmitting the pixel data to a display. The pipeline may also include other shaders at various stages in the pipeline, such as geometry shaders that use the output of the vertex shaders to generate a new set of primitives (or corresponding primitive information), as well as compute shaders (CS) which may implemented by a GPU to perform certain other general computational tasks.
One challenge associated with processing graphics in the pipeline is that certain bottlenecks may occur and slow down performance as data is input and output to the various shaders in the pipeline. Moreover, it is desirable to provide a developer of a particular application running the visuals with a large amount of control over how shaders utilize various visual parameters and underlying data in order to permit them to optimize of the rendering processes.
It is within this context that the present disclosure arises.